FRC Blogged - Team Update 1-15-2013

[Hallry]

Taken from the FRC Blog, 1/16/13: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...date-1-15-2013

Team Update 1-15-2013

Blog Date: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 - 15:55

Yesterday’s Team Update, which modified G23 and added G23-1, generated some controversy. Obviously it was not articulated as clearly as we had intended. I want to explain a little bit about the ‘whys’ and ‘whats’ behind the changes, but first, I apologize on behalf of FRC for the confusion and frustration. We try very hard not to change rules after Kickoff, and only do so when we believe that rule changes are the lesser of all alternative evils. The alternative evils in this case were either many robots that unwittingly violate the rules week 1 resulting in excessive penalties or many Teams discouraged from even attempting to climb because of the overly and unnecessarily constrained problem. But, we really hope to see lots of climbing robots!

Our intent with the rule change was to broaden the design envelope on climbing robots, not narrow it. See the recent answer to a related Q&A question.

In the words of one of our engineers, the new size cylinder rules are a superset of the old rules. Put another way: If you had designed a climbing robot legal under the old rules, it should still be legal under the new rules. If you can put any 54” right cylinder with a height of 84” around the robot, in any orientation, at any moment while it is climbing, and no part of the robot is more than 54” away from the base of the pyramid, your robot does not violate the new rules.

As I noted before, this blog is not an official source of the rules, but we hope that the new wording in the manual, and the answer we gave on the Q&A forum makes this more of a fun challenge (vs. frustrating) and much clearer.

Again, I apologize for the confusion, and thank you for your patience.



I’ll blog again soon.

Frank